We are in a crazy world right now. It is odd to think that the decision by an eccentric, South African, legal immigrant billionaire with Asperger's syndrome to buy Twitter might save free speech. It could also counter the leftist tech oligarchs' dogma of progressive orthodoxy. Let's hope the man with a "touch of the 'tism," as my Uncle Mac called it, succeeds.
Being in Twitter "jail" for the ideas that made him a billionaire encouraged Elon Musk to pay $44 billion to get his - and perhaps your - free speech back.
He is the left's worst nightmare, an ex-Democrat who has the guts to leave the plantation of leftist group-think and think for himself. He is now a Donald Trump they cannot ban or impeach.
What is important about Musk buying Twitter to make it more egalitarian is that he or others could do the same with other monopolies like Facebook and Google. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook with some stock voting rights shenanigans, so all he might do for his customers is "let them eat cake." Musk is buying Twitter to turn it into a forum for free speech. Maybe then he will buy CNN and turn it into a news channel or The New York Times and turn it into a newspaper.
It is telling that Musk, while making electric cars and keeping his views to himself, was once the toast of the left. Before he was outed as a free-thinking libertarian, Time magazine made him its 2021 Person of the Year. Folks over 60 didn't know him and asked, "Is Elon Musk a cologne?" Gen X folks asked, "What is Time's Person of the Year?" And Millennials wondered, "What is a magazine?"
People forget Musk's other innovations, including being more efficient than NASA in the spaceship launching business and the development of artificial intelligence in robots to perform mundane housekeeping chores.
The rocket Musk launched was named "Falcon Heavy." Libs were outraged by fat-shaming falcons like that, so California passed legislation to call it "Falcon Who is Just Big-Boned."
Innovators with their own capital made our country great, and there is no telling what is in store for us. As a kid, I always felt one day automobiles would fly, but I never imagined my brands of rice and syrup would be racist.
Left-wing, virtue-signaling elites bought Musk's Tesla cars first. But could we good ole boys be buying electric trucks soon? I saw a buddy spend two days trying to find a charging station for his electric car. At some point he must have been thinking, "Wow, I could have had a V8."
But if we Southerners do have electric trucks, country music must adapt. I totally see a country song about a man going broke, and both his wife and his truck leave him on the same day he gets out of Facebook prison.
It is fun watching billionaires like Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson apply their skills toward risky and manly space travel. It has "Revenge of the Nerds" written all over it. For their next feat of bravery, I'd like to see one of them buy an Apple laptop at Lenox Mall in Atlanta and make it back to his car with it.
Musk is not without some provocative thinking. Mars has polar ice caps like Earth on the northern and southern poles and averages temperatures of -81 degrees. When asked how to make Mars habitable to man, Musk suggested the best way to heat the planet is by "dropping bombs on the poles." If that rings a bell, those are the lyrics of a 1930s German drinking song.
An Axios website writer recently said of Musk, "He is increasingly behaving like a movie supervillain" because of his foray into media. Yet when Bezos bought The Washington Post as a vanity project, crickets.
Predictably, the left is protesting anyone owning media who does not slant information their way. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is so upset she said she will stop using Twitter and go back to sending smoke signals.
Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated op-ed satirist, author and TV/radio commentator, at Ron@RonaldHart.com or Twitter @RonaldHart.